Edgar Froese

Edgar Wilmar Froese (born on June 6th, 1944 in Tilsit) founded Tangerine Dream in September 1967 in Berlin, where he just had finished studies at the Academy for the Arts after almost four years. Froese himself: "I learned more substantial things about composing music than any conservatoire in the world could have taught me by studying painting and actually carving big rocks with a hammer and chisel."

Being known as an avantgarde electronic band in the later years, the original line-up of Tangerine Dream played no electronic instrument at all but drums, guitar, bass, violin and flute. The group mainly played at student parties and was well known in the experimental art scene, playing many gigs in galleries, at openings and accompanying art happenings for various national and international artists e.g. Joseph Beuys, Bernhard Hoeke, John Cage, Salvador Dali and many more.

After the band broke up due to too many ego trips, Edgar Froese played approximately four months with around 16 different musicians such as Paul Wheeler, a drummer from Liverpool, Sven Ake Johnson, a very good jazz drummer from Sweden, Al Akhbar, a young African drummer from Ghana, Steve Leuwen, a bass guitar player from Holland, Nick Turner, who later became the sax player for Hawkwind – to name a few. At that time, Edgar Froese scored his first feature film for the German director Jürgen Polland, "Never shoot the bathroom man" – a strange black and white movie.

In 1970 Edgar Froese married his wife Monika (a.k.a. Monique or Monica), who did the artwork for many of TD's album covers in the following years, and most of the band photographs during the last 35 years have been made by her (sadly, in 2000 she passed away after a long disease). In 1970, too, their son Jerome Froese was born, who would become a regular member of TD twenty years later.

In the mid-seventies David Bowie and Iggy Pop came to Berlin. Edgar and Monika Froese helped them at various stages, up to TD sharing their Berlin rehearsal stage built in an old theatre with both of them. There was even talk between David Bowie, Edgar Froese and Brian Eno of some musical collaboration, but there no publicly known musical output of this period.

Up to now Edgar Froese still is the nucleus of Tangerine Dream: Except very few solo contributions by other TD members, he co-composed and co-performed all of the hundreds of Tangerine Dream compositions. Besides his activities in the group Edgar Froese also released a number of solo albums.